We are blessed with much in the way of historical literature which offers the Historian great evidence in terms of social and political history.  For example, Jane Austen’s love and polite society, Dickensian industrial towns, cities and social class and the wild moorland romances of the Brontë sisters.  This course is not a critique of such works but an examination of what they tell us about the historical past, ranging from the Venerable Bede in the medieval period through to the moving portrayal of life during the First World War.